- Naming objects and layers appropriately is good practicefor any project you work on,whether it's in Cinema 4D,After Effects, Photoshop,you're going to want to know what something isso you can find it quickly and make changes.If you haven't named your objects correctly,you'll be forever turning things off and on,struggling to identify what needs to be changed.It's a bit of a pain to begin with,but it's a good habit to get into,and there's several tools in C4D to help us out.So while this file that we're lookingat here isn't a particularly large sim,it's not very clear what's happeningjust by looking at the object manager.

We have to certainly play through the simand see what's going on.And it looks like we have a particle being emitted,hitting the sphere,and causing some spawning action.I can look at the icons to give myself some ideaof what's going on and this icon is,sure enough the spawning emitter,so this one I'd call the Main emitter.The Main emitter's using Group 1,so I'll also name that to be Main.Looking at the Modifiers tab,we can see that both these modifiers have been excluded.

So these are only being used by the spawning emitter,so let's start re-naming the rest of this.We'll call our second group Spawn,and because we have quite a few other objects that needto be named in the same way,we'll just cmd-click,select them all, and use the naming toolto name them all at once.I'm going to put a space and type Spawn,so anything I have selected when I click Replace Name,will just change,and that's a really fast way of naming a lot of objects.

We're going to call the sphere a Collider,'cause you can see it has a collider tag on it.So this is looking pretty good.At a glance I can see we've got Main particlesand Spawning particles,but we can do better.Let's add these objects to layers.Layers are a way of grouping scene itemsthat can be controlled together.Just going to cmd-click the main objects,right click and choose Add to New Layer.If we bring up our Layers palette,we can re-name that newly created layer to Main,and we'll drag in the tag as well,'cause you can also add those.

Let's select the rest of the objects relating to the spawn,and right click and Add to a New Layer.Change that layer's name to be Spawn,and also give it a different color'cause it's quite similar to the Main one.We also need to re-name this material,because that's on the Spawn Trail.So I'll do that now and we'll just drag thatonto the Spawn layer as well.Now we can solo the objects,and effectively filter out what we don't need,or what we're not concentrating on at this time.

We can also use the Search tool hereto filter the object manager.So now you can see how much cleaner this is to read,and if someone else is picking up the file,it's clear what everything does.It might even be you coming to revisit the file laterdown the line in production.Either way,by using the naming tool and layers in C4D,we've organized our objects.You can now easily use the search,or simply isolate objects using the layer toolsto make changes to just those things.

Before we move on,let's look at an example where it can get quite scaryif we've forgotten to rename along the way.And as you can see with this particle sim,there's a heck of a lot going on,and not a lot of ideas of where to start.So now you know how important it isto keep organized and how to do it,we'll look at some other waysof keeping our sims neat and tidy.

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Released

10/30/2015

X-Particles is an awesome addition to CINEMA 4D, allowing artists to create finely rendered fluid simulations, dynamics, and collisions quickly and easily. This course gets you started with this powerful plugin. Join Andy Needham as he walks through the Emitter interface, shows how to use modifiers to change the look and behavior of particles, create visible particles that trail and branch, make fluid and fire simulations, and render your work. He'll also provide workflow tips and a series of miniprojects that show how to create effects like pixie dust and fireworks with X-Particles.